Ancaps often declare, "All rights are property rights." I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of running into libertarians online who insisted that libertarianism supports "the freedom of movement," and realized that this principle actually entails that people without property have no rights at all, let alone any right to "freedom of movement." Of course, immediately, any ancap readers still left here are going to say, "Wait a second! Everyone owns his own body! And so everyone at least has the right to not have his body interfered with." Well, that is true... except that in ancapistan, one has no right to any place to put that body, except if one owns property, or has the permission of at least one property owner to place that body on her land. So, if one is landless and penniless, one had sure better hope that there are kindly disposed property owners aligned in a corridor from wherever one happens to be to wherever the...
This actually shows the quality of the article:
ReplyDelete"Of course, the “Austrian school” is not a school in the traditional sense of the word denoting a physical structure; the term defines those who believe in pure free-market economics and laissez-faire principles."
I had the wrong URL for that last link: sorry about that.
ReplyDeleteGene, do you still consider yourself an Austrian economist? (Just curious).
ReplyDeleteMy paper "Economics and it's modes," published in The Journal of Collingwood and British Idealism Studies, recommnds a pluralistic approach to economics. That has been my view since at least 2004, when I began working on that paper. (It was first my master's thesis at LSE.)
ReplyDelete"If you read a site like Lew Rockwell.Com..."
ReplyDeleteYour first mistake was reading LewRockwell.Com.
Ah, but Prateek, I read it for amusement value.
ReplyDeleteAh, but of course.
ReplyDeleteLRC is one of the wackiest websites ever made.
I think the people there deliberately want to keep it that way, but...a long pretense creates a reality.
It's like LRC was made by libertarians to troll on the internet. But their trolling went so far, they started trolling themselves.
David Kramer, whom acquaintances describe as an otherwise calm and easygoing person, is anything but that when he does his LRC blog posts.
Please consider this comment responsive not to the LRC articles, but rather to the implicit notion that "plunging" public support for free markets is an indicator that free marketers are losing the "battle of ideas."
ReplyDeleteFacially it seems obvious that that's the case. On the other hand:
1) The old Gandhi aphorism, "first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." It could be that "plunging support" for free markets merely means that more people have made it past the first two stages.
2) If the mental process of working through economics at the popular level in any way resembles the "five stages of grief," then progress from denial (of the existence of free market economics) to anger (over the tenets of free market economics) is, well, progress.
Well, the Mises Institute site is a mixture of silly posts and high quality articles, and the main result of that is that they are lowering those articles's reputation. It's a disservice to Ludwig von Mises.
ReplyDelete